I finally got around to watching The Blind Side. I know it's a (mostly) true story, but it still follows the sports-movie formula: the hero overcoming great odds to excel but then hitting a bad patch and going AWOL for a brief period before returning to nail down the happy ending (not the Big Game this time, but a football scholarship). Is there any other kind of sports movie?

There's one other difference. The sports star plays second fiddle to the movie star. It's Sandra Bullock's movie, all the way. But there are other kinds of sports movies. I'm sure there are. I might even think of one, some day.

One advantage of waking up too early and not being able to go back to sleep is getting to see good old movies you missed. Unfortunately, early this a.m. was not one of those times. A 1950s movie called The Star has Bette Davis playing a washed-up movie star who goes bankrupt. Sterling Hayden is a shipbuilder who gives her shelter when she's locked out of her rented apartment. It was the hammiest performance I've ever seen Bette Davis give. Simply dreadful. But Sterling Hayden, whom I'd always found stiff and uninteresting, was realistic and believable in his second-banana role. It's a sappy movie.

Two years after. The IMDB says the role was first offered to Joan Crawford, who turned it down. Bette Davis was first offered Sudden Fear, a role she turned down that was subsequently played by Joan Crawford. Both women were nominated for an Oscar. This I don't understand at all.

Ah, good question -- especially as the movie has one scene of intentional self-parody. Given the chance to play the older sister of the lead in a movie she's wanted to do for years, Davis swallows her pride at being asked to read for a part and agrees to an audition. The scene she plays with an actor calls for her to be surly and resentful, but she thinks if she plays it young and girly she'll convince the director to give her the lead. To that end, she does a dead perfect impersonation of herself as a young girl -- the big Bette Davis eyes, the flirtatious manner, the lilt in the voice. It's the best acting she does in the entire movie. All wrong for the role she's supposed to be auditioning for, of course, so she torpedoes herself. She realizes this later, so that's an excuse for more scenery-chewing.

But I don't think that makes the rest of her performance self-parody, although I admit the thought did cross my mind. I think she was just overcompensating for a weak script. For instance, whenever a crisis arises in her life (about every ten minutes), she flops down on somebody's bed and cries herself to sleep. Had to sell off all her possessions? Flop and cry. Got locked out? Flop and cry. Got arrested on a DUI? Flop and cry. No bed handy? Okay, a sofa will do...flop.